“Col. George Morgan embarked at the village of Kaskaskia, on the Kaskaskia River, for his voyage down the Mississippi on the 21st of November, 1766. Butler, in his history of Kentucky, gives the credit of being the first American citizen to descend the Mississippi to Col. Taylor, in 1769. Col. Morgan was the first American citizen to found a colony in the Territory of Louisiana. Under a grant of King Carlos IV, he built the city of New Madrid, March, 1789. The grant embraced some 15,000,000 acres of land. (Gayarré; ‘History of Louisiana.’) On June 20, 1788, Congress ordered the annulment of Col. Morgan’s Indian claim to a greater portion of the state of Illinois, ‘claiming the land bordering on the Mississippi, from the mouth of the Ohio to a determined station on the Mississippi that shall be sixty or eighty miles north from the mouth of the Illinois River, and extending from the Mississippi as far eastward as may.’ The treaty meeting held under the auspices of Sir William Johnson at Fort Stanwix, when the Indians deeded the territory of Indiana to George Morgan, his father-in-law John Boynton, and his partner Samuel Wharton, (Boynton, Wharton & Morgan) and several other minor traders whose goods had been despoiled, was held on November 3, 1768. The state of Virginia claimed the territory after the Revolutionary War, and bullied the national government into compliance with her claims, the United States accepting the property as a present from Virginia, immediately after deciding in her favor. (See Journal of Congress, 1784, Feb. 26.)” CHAPTER VIII DANIEL BOONE In preceding chapters we have taken up in general and in particular the origin, the purpose and the progress of the early American frontiersman. We have seen how this man, impelled by one reason or another, began to push outward on his way over the Appalachian range into the valley of the Mississippi. We have seen that the course of west-bound civilization was at first not wholly along the easiest way, but over barriers that had apparently been established by nature as insurmountable. From headwater to headwater, among these rugged hills, from one valley into another, ever and ever westward, the early American had won his way, until he struck the waters running into the lower Gulf by way of that great highway of the interior floods, the Mississippi River. We have seen that for a space the early population did not head directly westward, but dropped down from Pennsylvania into Maryland and Virginia, and from Maryland and Virginia into the Carolinas.